Ever since Tesla has emerged as an alternative, there's just no point in going to a dealership anymore. Tesla doesn't care how I pay them.
The person buying the car shouldn’t be shamed for prioritizing what they feel is important in the buying process. It’s being driven by the person buying the car, not the broader public.
I also mentioned buying used cars. My approach in no way limits the range of cars available for me to purchase.
If you don't like it, well, it's my life, not yours, and I detest the dealership experience. I get to live my life how I want. In a nation of entitled whiners, this is the one thing we are truly entitled to do. You can be different.
Not if you compare apples to apples. The cheapest model 3 is significantly more expensive than a Toyota or Kia with equivalent seating and trim.
People with kids will end up paying 90-100K for the model X vs minivans which are in the 35-40K range.
Tesla has a luxury premium and it’s a bit silly to claim otherwise.
Look up what the word "average" means. If you are accusing Tesla buyers of buying privileged expensive cars, then you are necessarily also accusing the vast majority of new car buyers of the same thing. There's no way around it.
Toyotas and Kias are not representative of average new cars in America. Teslas are.
For now, let's get past this initial disagreement by using a different name. I've seen people use the phrase "techno-luxury" to describe what Tesla is doing and to distinguish it from the usual notion of luxury cars.
Luxury cars, as I understand it, are characterized by some or all of the following things: physical comfort, richness of sensory experiences, quality of materials and build, noise reduction, and at the very high end of the market, "quirks and features" such as automatically opening and closing car doors, refrigerators in the back seat, umbrellas inside the door jambs, and so on. There is a category of luxury such as Ferrari or Bugatti that emphasizes performance to a certain extent, but I really really doubt that many people will take their Bugatti out to the track for a day.
Techno-luxury, on the other hand, emphasizes entirely different quirks and features: app access, long-term climate control (4 hours+) for when you're sitting in the car a long time, in-car youtube, in-car netflix, in-car video games, autonomous driving capability, built-in dashcam viewable from the app, location tracking, valet mode and other security features, and so on. There is some overlap between luxury and techno-luxury, in that some traditional luxury cars have some of these features, but Tesla still does it better than anyone else if you are specifically looking for techno-luxury, which I am.
Tesla fails all, with frequent misaligned panels, paint bubbling, ill-fitting parts, etc. It has software bells and whistels, but shitty build quality for the hardware.
20+ years ago, we did a trade-off in the datacenter, replacing single piece of expensive hardware with multiple copies of cheap hardware, with software to patch over the deficiencies. That doesn't work as well when the product is a single piece of hardware.
With some smart software, I can run 3 servers at 50% uptime each, and get 100% uptime. I can't get one nicely assembled car from two shitty ones.
You're not buying a new car every day. As long as you have one good car, it doesn't matter very much to you how badly the other ones of the same model are built.
My car is 5+ years old and still working fine.